Willem Klooster, Ph.D.

Professor Klooster received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Groningen in 1983 and 1987, respectively, and a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden in 1995. He has been at Clark since 2003.

Current Research and Teaching

Dr. Klooster specializes in the history of the Atlantic world (15th-19th centuries). He teaches classes on comparative colonialism (the Americas), the age of Atlantic revolutions (1776-1824), and Caribbean history.

Selected Publications

Work in Progress

The Dutch Moment in Atlantic History (under contract with Cornell University Press).

(co-authored with Gert Oostindie) The Dutch Atlantic in the Long Eighteenth Century (under consideration by Cornell University Press).

Books (All Peer Reviewed)

(Co-editor with Oostindie, Gert) Curacao in the Age of Revolutions: 1795-1800 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011).

Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York University Press, 2009).

(Editor) Migration, Trade, and Slavery in an Expanding World: Essays in Honor of Pieter Emmer (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009).

(co-editor with Wayne te Brake) Power and the City in the Netherlandic World, 1400-1700 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006).

Book Chapters and Articles

Peer-Reviewed

"The Caribbean and the Atlantic World," in Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 7: The Early Modern Period, c.1470-c.1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

"Atlantic and Caribbean Perspectives: Analyzing a Hybrid and Entangled World" in Peter N. Miller, ed., Peoples & the Sea: Thalassography and Historiography in the Twenty-First Century (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 60-83.

"The Essequibo Liberties: The Link between Jewish Brazil and Jewish Suriname" Studia Rosenthaliana 42-43 (2010-2011 [published in November 2012]), 77-82.

[with Victor Enthoven] "Contours of Virginia-Dutch Trade in the Long Seventeenth Century" in Douglas Bradburn and John Coombs, eds., Early Modern Virginia: New Essays on the Old Dominion (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 90-127.

Winds of Change: Colonization, Commerce, and Consolidation in the 17th-Century Atlantic World" in Martha D. Shattuck and Elisabeth Paling Funk, eds., A Beautiful and Fruitful Place: Selected Rensselaerswijck Seminar Papers, vol. 2 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2011), 209-215.

"The Greater Caribbean in 1795: The Rising Expectations of Free and Enslaved Blacks" in Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie, eds., Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, 1795-1800 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011), 57-74.

"The Tobacco Nation: English Traders and Pipe-Makers in Rotterdam, 1620-1650" in Laura Cruz and Joel Mokyr, eds., The Birth of Modern Europe: Culture and Economy, 1400-1800 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 17-34.

"The Dutch in the Atlantic," in Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith, eds., Handbook Dutch-American Relations (Amsterdam: Boom and Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2009), 63-73.

"Manumission in an Entrepôt: The Case of Curaçao," in Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 161-174.

"Networks of Colonial Entrepreneurs: The Founders of the Jewish Settlements in Dutch America, 1650s and 1660s," in Richard Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 31-49, 226-236.

"Northern Europeans Invade the Americas," in Alison F. Games and Adam Rothman, eds., Major Problems in Atlantic History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 111-115.

"The Jews in Suriname and Curaçao," in Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), 350-368.

"Failing to Square the Circle: The West India Company's Volte-Face in 1638-39," De Halve Maen: Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America 73 (2000), 3-9.

[with Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt] "The Influence of the American Revolution in the Netherlands," in Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole, eds., A Companion to the American Revolution (Boston and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 545-549.

[with Enriqueta Vila Vilar] "Forced African Settlement: The Basis of Freed Settlement, Africa and its Trading Conditions," in P.C. Emmer and Germán Carrera Damas, eds., General History of the Caribbean, Volume II: New Societies: The Caribbean in the Long Sixteenth Century (London: UNESCO Publishing, Macmillan Education, 1999), 159-179.

"Subordinate but Proud: Curaçao's Free Blacks and Mulattoes in the Eighteenth Century," New West Indian Guide 68: 3-4 (1994), 283-300.

"The Dutch Republic as an Economic and Political Model in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hispanic America," in Rosemarijn Höfte and Joke Kardux, eds., Connecting cultures: the Netherlands in five centuries of transatlantic exchange (Amsterdam, VU University Press, 1994), 229-237.

Koot, Christian J. Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621-1713 (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Reviewed in Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales 67:2 (2012), 528-530.

Diptee, Audra A. From Africa to Jamaica: The Making of an Atlantic Slave Society, 1775-1807 (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2010). Reviewed in The Historian (December 2011), 893-894.

Karras, Alan L. Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History (Lanham, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). Reviewed in Journal of World History 22:2 (June 2011), 375-377.

Bruijn, Iris. Ship's Surgeons of the Dutch East India Company: Commerce and the Progress of Medicine in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2009). Reviewed in American Historical Review 115:4 (October 2010), 1231-1232.

Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Reviewed in International Journal of Maritime History 16: 2 (December 2004): 334-335.

Shorto, Russell. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (New York: Doubleday, 2004). Reviewed in de Halve Maen: Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America 77:2 (Summer 2004): 35.

Prins, Johanna C., Bettina Brandt, Timothy Stevens, and Thomas F. Shannon, eds., The Low Countries and the New World(s): Travel, Discovery, Early Relations (Lanham, NY: University Press of America, 2000). Reviewed in New West Indian Guide 77: 3-4 (2003): 314-315.

Blom, J.C.H., R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld and I. Schöffer, eds., The History of the Jews in the Netherlands (Oxford, Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002). Reviewed on H-JUDAIC, May 6, 2003.

O'Brien, Patrick, ed. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Reviewed in Business History Review 76:1 (2002): 186-188.

Berdan, Frances F. and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, eds., The Essential Codex Mendoza (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). Reviewed in Journal of Early Modern History 4:1 (2000): 130.